


Later

by languageintostillair



Series: After an Almost [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Cersei Lannister and Jaime Lannister Are Not Related, F/M, Just Roll With It, Past Cersei Lannister/Jaime Lannister, Post-Break Up, but not really a break up, in the sense that they weren't ever in a relationship, with a very very slightly hopeful ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23120935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/languageintostillair/pseuds/languageintostillair
Summary: Hey,is what Brienne ends up typing,I hope you’re doing well.(He will hate her for this formality, she knows, if he doesn’t still hate her for leaving.)I just got back from Winterfell.(She’d arrived in King’s Landing two months ago.)If you don’t still need my sweater,(she can’t think of why he’dneedit, but she wants to be polite)do you think I could have it back? I can come by your office(she almost adds ‘or apartment’, then decides against it)tomorrow. Just let me know what time works best. Thanks.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Series: After an Almost [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1662541
Comments: 90
Kudos: 227





	Later

**Hey.** |

 **Hey** |

 **He** |

 **H** |

|

_Hey. I know it’s been two years since we last spoke, but I wanted you to know that I’m sorry I left the way I did. I’m sorry I let you believe that our friendship was enough for me, that I didn’t want anything more than that. I’m sorry that I was never sure what I wanted from you. I’m sorry I never gave you any indication that I would have wanted something different than what we had. I’m sorry I never told you what I might have wanted from you until the last possible moment, and only because I knew I was going to leave, and because I was sure you were going to leave me anyway. I’m sorry I went off to Winterfell for two years and blocked you on everything while I was there. I’m sorry it hurt too much to have any kind of contact with you. I’m sorry it still hurts._

These are all the things Brienne doesn’t want to say. Even if she did want to say them, it wouldn’t matter. There’s no point in telling him any of it now, in making empty apologies. It’s been too long.

She stares at the cursor on her phone. It blinks at her at regular intervals, as it always does. It waits.

 _Hey. I want to tell you everything._ But telling him everything feels selfish. If she did type all of it out, and hit send after, she knows it will feel like she did it only to make herself feel better—and even then, she’s not quite sure if it will.

Telling him everything wouldn’t change anything. And perhaps it might hurt him, too.

Or perhaps it won’t.

Anyway. It would be selfish. She doesn’t need closure from him; he doesn’t owe that to her. She doesn’t owe _him_ closure, either.

Nonetheless, all those words sit, invisible, in the blank space where the cursor is still blinking, still waiting. Once she types out her actual message—a cold, and distant, and necessary thing—that blank space will all be erased, and all those words along with it.

She can say everything, only by saying nothing.

 **Hey,** is what Brienne ends up typing, **I hope you’re doing well.** (He will hate her for this formality, she knows, if he doesn’t still hate her for leaving.) **I just got back from Winterfell.** (She’d arrived in King’s Landing two months ago.) **If you don’t still need my sweater,** (she can’t think of why he’d _need_ it, but she wants to be polite) **do you think I could have it back? I can come by your office** (she almost adds ‘or apartment’, then decides against it) **tomorrow. Just let me know what time works best. Thanks.**

It’s so stupid. A sweater. Nothing she’d ever wear in public—it’s a bright blue knitted thing, a giant sword emblazoned on the front with a bright red ruby set in its bright yellow-gold hilt. It’s a garish design, but she’d liked it when she saw it in a thrift store ages ago, and bought it on a whim. He’d been with her, actually. Almost bought it for her, before she stopped him like she always did. He’d always been too easy with money. It was a thrift store, anyway. She could afford a sweater from a thrift store.

It’s a garish design, but she imagines it might look fashionable on the right person.

The right person just isn’t her.

It’s the softest thing in the world, though—he had called it the softest thing in the world. And then she had let him wear it, and then she liked seeing him wear it, even if she never told him that, and then she let him keep it at his apartment—she was over there quite often, anyway, just to hang out—and then she forgot that she’d let him keep it. And then she left.

Or maybe she didn’t forget. Maybe she wanted to leave something with him. Something that belonged to her, that she could come back for.

It’s so stupid.

He doesn’t reply for seven hours, though she can see that he’s read the message. She tries not to care that it takes him seven hours. She doesn’t want to go back to that place, when she used to care so much about the whats, and whens, and hows of his messages.

Then again, she remembers trying not to care back then, too. It’s not healthy—simultaneously caring and trying not to care, with equal intensity. She wonders if that’s what it felt like for him, with—

_I’m sorry it still hurts._

**Hey,** is what he says, when he finally replies. **Welcome back!** (It’s fake, it’s so fake, it’s not him at all, he must hate her.) **Sure, but I’m not free tomorrow.** (There was a time, a lifetime ago, when she knew all the ins and outs of his schedule. _Why isn’t he free tomorrow?_ asks some distant part of her mind that she’d thought she’d buried. She hates herself too now.) **Can you do the day after?**

Fine. One day makes no difference. She just has to get the sweater. She’s about to type out her response when she receives: **Coffee? The usual place?**

 _The usual place._ So much for not offering to go to his apartment. The usual place is a cafe right next to the main entrance of his building. It seems silly to call it _usual_ , when it hasn’t been _usual_ for two years.

 _I don’t know if that’s a good idea_ , she wants to say. _I don’t know if I can see you again._ But that means telling him _I’m sorry it still hurts_ , and Brienne had already decided that she doesn’t want to do that. And she’d prepared for this, hadn’t she? She’d wanted to do this, to set the conditions for their next meeting, to control it. She wanted her sweater back. She wanted to prove to herself that she could be strong and mature, and she could see him again, just to get this one last thing. Once she gets it back, she can sever him from her life forever. There will be nothing left between them.

 **I’m pretty busy the day after,** she lies, **but I can come by your office around 1 to pick it up.**

She puts her phone away. She only checks it an hour or so later.

**Okay. I have a lunch meeting, so I won’t be there, but I’ll leave it with my assistant.**

Alright. That’s good, isn’t it? She won’t even have to see him. She feels a tiny prick of disappointment, but more because she wanted to show him—show _herself_ —that she could be strong and mature in his presence. That’s what she tells herself, at least, about that tiny prick of disappointment. She considers suggesting that she pick up the sweater from his assistant tomorrow, since they won’t be meeting either way, but she doesn’t want to prolong the conversation. So she just sends, **Okay, thanks!**

(She doesn’t feel okay, or thankful, or anything close to an emotion that could be expressed with an exclamation point.)

Honestly, Brienne barely thinks about it for the next two days. When she shows up at his office, it turns out she doesn’t even have to see his assistant. The sweater, in a white paper bag, had been left with reception. She picks it up and leaves. She severs him from her life.

It was all going according to plan until she steps out of his office building, and bumps right into him.

The paper bag falls to the ground.

He bends to pick it up with his left hand, and she briefly wonders if his right feels significantly better than it used to, assuming he’d continued his therapy within the past two years. She couldn’t get a good look at him before he bent down. She saw a flash of grey in his beard that wasn’t there before, but that is all.

Everything is the same. Everything is different.

She can’t—she can’t breathe.

“Hey,” he says, when he straightens and holds the bag out to her. “Just got back from my… You look well.”

“Hey,” she replies. “You… you too. Thanks. For the—thanks.”

She can’t look in his eyes, so she looks down at his hand as she reaches for the bag.

He’s wearing a ring.

She wants to throw up.

“Thanks,” she says again, almost snatching the bag from him. “Bye.”

Then, she walks away.

She never got a good look at him. Now she wishes she saw his face, instead of his ring. She wishes that wasn’t the last memory she has of him. His _ring_. So he’d gone and married that woman after all. Brienne had managed to avoid almost all mention, all news of him in the two years she’d spent in Winterfell. Now she’s back here, and he has a ring.

The strange thing is, she doesn’t know what to feel. It’s not _nothing_ , but she doesn’t know what it is that trembles inside her. She doesn’t think this is what moving on feels like. But she’s not shattered, and she doesn’t cry. She saw his ring, and it just reminded her that she would never be enough for him, not in the way she’d wanted to be, two, three years ago.

But she doesn’t cry.

She thinks she’ll be able to sleep tonight, though, and that feels like progress to her. She’d had a few sleepless nights before, because of him. She can’t vouch for whether she’ll be able to sleep through the night, but it’s just past eleven, and she can barely keep her eyes open, and that feels like progress.

Then, her phone buzzes on her bedside table.

Worse, Brienne makes the mistake of picking it up, rather than waiting till morning.

 **Hey.** Just _Hey._ They never used to say that, back when they were friends. ‘Hey’ is the beginning of a conversation, and it never felt like they’d needed that. Why would you start, or restart, a conversation that never ended?

She doesn’t unlock her phone. Just stares at the little rectangle on her lock screen. _Hey._

She waits.

Another notification appears.

**I’d really like to get coffee sometime next week. If you’re free.**

_Oh._

She opens her messages now, puts her fingers over the last of their two-year-old texts to shield them from herself. The texts before **Hey.**

 _Won’t your wife mind?_ she wants to type, bitter as it sounds in her head. She knows his wife would, from the little she knows about her. They’d hardly talked about his ex, back when his wife was still his ex. They’d been so close, and they’d never once spoken about her, though he told Brienne almost everything else. All she knew was that this ex existed, and it had ended badly, and it had broken him. Brienne was never sure if his silence on the subject was because he genuinely didn’t want to talk about it, or because he knew that talking about it would hurt Brienne in some way. He’d seemed surprised, though, when she’d told him about her feelings, so it probably wasn’t the latter.

(Brienne had always felt some guilt about this—that he couldn’t confide in her about this one thing. She never asked about it, even back when she considered him nothing more than a friend. At the time, she thought she was respecting his privacy. Later, much later, she realised it would simply have hurt too much to know.)

Anyway, he never spoke about it. So it was when he started speaking to Brienne _less_ , on the whole, that she began suspecting something. Because he’d told her everything, it was only logical that if he was telling her less, there was something he was keeping from her. And there was only one thing he kept from her.

 _Won’t your wife mind?_ she wants to type. But she shouldn’t. She knows she shouldn’t. All she has to do is refuse, or even ignore the message altogether, and that would be the end of that. She has the sweater back, and it’s over, really over between them.

It’s not as if there had been anything between them in the first place.

**Won’t your wife mind?**

_Fuck._

Her mind had gone blank, and the next thing she knows, she’s looking at that message on her phone screen. That _sent_ message. It feels like the most impulsive thing she’s ever done. Four words.

A little bubble pops up, the one with the three dots that means he’s typing. And then it disappears. And then it pops up again. And disappears. She thinks of all the time she’s spent staring at that bubble in her life. She switches off her phone, leaves it on the bedside table, tries to fall asleep before he can decide how he wants to reply to that text that she can’t unsend.

Instead, her phone rings.

It might not be him. It might be someone else.

She picks up her phone and—it’s him. His face shows up on her phone screen, and there isn’t any grey in his beard. She took that photo three years ago.

“Hey,” she hears him say.

“Hey.”

“Is this okay? Calling you?”

 _No._ She’d told him not to contact her while she was in Winterfell.

But she’s not in Winterfell anymore.

“I answered the phone, didn’t I?” Hells. She can’t smoothen the edges in her voice. She’s not strong or mature after all.

He laughs, a short and helpless thing. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s good to hear your voice, that’s all. I missed you.” And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he adds— “I _miss_ you.”

There was a time when she would have killed to hear him say that to her again. She wouldn’t have, but at the time, it felt like she might. He used to say things like that all the time; he was careless that way. Still is, apparently. Now she’s feeling homicidal for other reasons.

 _Fuck him_.

“Don’t do this, Jaime,” she warns. “Don’t say things like that.”

“It’s the truth.”

 _Fuck you._ “Jaime.” _You have a wife._

It’s as if he hears her thoughts, because the next thing he says is: “I’m not—we’re not together anymore.”

_What?_

She doesn’t say anything—she can’t—and a few seconds later, he continues with: “It didn’t work out.”

That’s all. _It didn’t work out._ There’s so much that she doesn’t know. That she never knew. It’s all hitting her square in the face now.

“Your—your ring—” she stammers.

“Oh. Fuck.”

 _That’s it? That’s all he has to say?_ Then she remembers, again, that he doesn’t owe her a thing. There was—there was never anything between them. They were friends, and that was all. “It doesn’t matter,” she sighs. “The answer is no, Jaime. I won’t have coffee with you.” She doesn’t want to hear it anymore. She has the sweater back. She’s severed him from her life.

(The sweater is still in the paper bag, on the kitchen counter. She hasn’t had the courage to take it out. She knows it would smell of his apartment. Of him.)

“Please, Brienne. It’s just coffee, I swear. We don’t even have to go to our usual place. Pick a neutral ground, I don’t care.”

 _Just_ coffee _. Just_ friends _._ She’s so sick of _just_ , even after two years away from it _._ But she can feel her resolve crumbling already, and against her better judgment, she blurts out:

“Maybe later. Not—not next week. Not yet.”

She regrets those words immediately. This isn’t severing him from her life. This is the opposite of severing him from her life.

“Okay,” he breathes, and she wants to forget that she can hear the hope in his voice. “Okay. I can wait.” _Fuck._ “Later.”

She should correct herself. She should refuse. There is no possibility of coffee, no _later_. But all she can say is, “Goodnight, Jaime.”

“Goodnight, Brienne.”

She barely sleeps that night. She thinks only of _later_.

**Author's Note:**

> Um. So, this happened. I’ve been thinking about this idea for a while now, and I was in the mood to write some angst today, so I did. In a world in which I’m not writing two WIPs, I might actually make this a series. It would be angst with a happy ending, definitely, but I’m interested in exploring how a relationship could grow out of a situation in which nothing ever really happened, nobody ever owed anything to the other person, but trauma and feelings of betrayal were allowed to fester anyway. How could healthy communication (which underlies all the stories I write) grow out of all the things repressed and unsaid?
> 
> BUT – after I finish The Assignment.


End file.
